Whether you’re managing a new or more established business, digital transformation will be a necessary step that your organization must take along its journey. Digital transformation brings a myriad of good things for a business: better efficiency, better cost management, better customer experience, better flexibility, and better transparency. And there’s one most important thing that digital transformation brings, which is a higher level of competitiveness. Digital transformation helps your business press on by digitally improving so many different aspects.

Nonetheless, even in the digital age, digital transformation has never been smooth sailing. McKinsey found that failure happens to 70% of digital transformations. Although this finding means that digital transformation is a risky move, your business still needs it, as digitally stagnant companies find it even harder to keep up (Forbes found that 55% of businesses without digital transformation believe that they would lose market share within one year). Hence, every business with a digital transformation plan should think of assembling a formidable digital transformation team.

…But What’s A Formidable Digital Transformation Team?

With so many models, goals, and priorities in setting up a digital transformation team, assembling a digital transformation team may get overwhelming. To give some insights on this, Robert Werkema, Vice President Strategic Customers at VTEX, has shared some wisdom on building a good digital transformation team. He believes that there are generally 3 groups you should incorporate to your digital transformation team: the core team, SI partners, and vendors.

The core team should not only have a good balance between business and IT department, but also consist of people who are invested and have made contributions to your organization. As for System Integrator partners, you will need them to connect the technological gap that may exist during the deployment phase. In addition, your vendors should be reliable technology providers so that possible tech obstacles in the digital transformation process can be avoided.

Several Key Roles in A Great Digital Transformation Team

Digital Transformation process can be arduous, so you will need several key roles in your team. One of the most important key roles would be held by data experts. Chief Data Officers, Data Architects, Cloud Architects, and Database Administrators are important people who can make sure that your customer data is completely safe, accessible and well-managed. With excellent data management, customer trust won’t be an issue. At the same time, you can easily access customer data easily to better understand their needs. 

Another important role would be business process experts. Involving different elements of automation, digital transformation process can be very complicated. If this issue isn’t tackled well, it may create pitfalls that can affect the outcome. Here, business process experts can become valuable team members who will analyze existing workflow and possible risks that may occur during adaptation. Next, business process experts will redesign the workflow so that it may be more suitable with your business condition during and after the digital transformation. 

In assembling a digital transformation team, it’s easy to focus on possible internal risks and issues from the IT sides. But it seems that many organizations forget how their customers will be affected by the transformation. Forbes found that just 19% of companies are equipped with a CX team. A great digital transformation team will need UX/CX experts as they help your customers align with the changes. If the digital transformation succeeds, they will bring revenue, too. Data from Forbes show that 67% consumers are willing to spend more for experience.